The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [11]
Judge Jerram was still Seth Chism’s son-in-law, which didn’t entitle him to a better price than anyone else—he paid the same two dollars per gallon—but he began to buy up every last drop that Seth and his boys could make, as fast as they could make it, and Sull had it hauled off to Jasper, where it was loaded onto a big newfangled vehicle called a motortruck and taken off to Harrison. The Chisms ran out of containers; every jug and gallon demijohn in Stay More had been rinsed and refilled and sold to Sull Jerram, and all the jugs and demijohns that he could bring in from Jasper, Parthenon, Spunkwater, Swain, Nail, Deer—whatever community might have a few—he rounded them up and the Chisms filled them and they found their way to Harrison. When all the jugs and demijohns in Newton County had disappeared, they began to use bean pots, cream pitchers, stone jars, wash pitchers, chicken fountains, soup tureens, punchbowls, compotes, gravy boats, even slop jars or thundermugs.
The Chisms ran out of corn. Or, rather, the Ingledews’ gristmill could not furnish any more cornmeal, having ground up everything the Chisms had raised. My father even made a little pin money selling the hard-dent corn out of his corncrib, and so did everyone else, until all of that was gone, and there were a lot of hungry hogs and chickens that winter. Sull Jerram arranged with whoever was buying the finished product in Harrison to start supplying the raw product, and the motortruck that was transporting the load of containers into Harrison would return with a load of corn or cornmeal.
What the Chisms didn’t know then was that Sull Jerram and his courthouse gang were buying the Chisms’ whiskey for two dollars a gallon and sending it to Harrison, where they were getting four, five, and then six dollars a gallon for it.
But one night in the spring of 1914, the Boone County sheriff and his deputies stopped that motortruck at the Boone County line and confiscated a whole load of whiskey, arrested and jailed the driver, and kept the motortruck. Sull Jerram’s entire bootlegging operation came to a halt. Our new sheriff Duster Snow talked to the Boone County sheriff, but the latter was incorruptible. Judge Jerram tried to work out a deal with the Boone County judge, but the latter was, while not incorruptible, unswayed by Sull’s terms.
Seth Chism, visiting his daughter Irene and her husband the judge at their new Jasper house, had been impressed with their improved standard of living. He himself had built a new barn, put a new roof on his still, replaced his thirty-five-gallon pot still with a hundred-gallon copper still, and replaced the old bedrock furnace with a snail shell furnace, all with the profits from his increased production. And his wife Nancy took to wearing Sears, Roebuck dresses to church. Seth appreciated these improvements, and he was sympathetic when he heard about the confiscation of the motortruck, and he said he’d talk to his boy Nail when Judge Jerram suggested that Nail might be willing to transport a load of whiskey inside his wagon of sheep’s wool, which was going to Harrison anyway.
Nail said he didn’t have any room, that his fleece wagon was loaded down with fleece and the axles would break if he took on a cargo of concealed whiskey. He was just telling the truth. He didn’t really object to his brother-in-law’s bootlegging, although he had resented the extra time he’d had to spend working the still, time spent away from his sheep, who needed him, especially now that shearing time had come. Nail liked making whiskey, and he liked drinking it, and he liked selling it, or he liked seeing his father sell so much of it that the farmplace was getting some improvements. But he just couldn’t see his way to risking a broken axle or two by carrying a load of whiskey inside the load of fleece.
“You’re jist afraid of gittin caught,” Sull Jerram taunted him.
“No, I aint afraid